A year and 2 days ago I landed in Shanghai, China. Time flies by so fast. It feels just like yesterday I was teaching in Fuyang, China threatening to kill all my students. This year has most definitely been an experience that I will never forget and I am very glad that I kept some form of journal, my blog, so that I can go back and remind myself just in case I start to forget what exactly I have been through in these last 12 months. Even now I occasionally go back and read and am amazed.

I am still working on the super long post about why I made the decision to go home. I may have to wait until I get home to finish it. It’s already over 2,000 words and I still haven’t gotten to the most interesting part of the story yet. I’ll see what I can do before tomorrow morning when I head out. We’ve just been so busy going to the last few places that we’ve wanted to see and spending time with the people we will probably miss the most – Patty, Eddie, and Elisa, some fellow Americans we met here in Xiamen. Also, we’ve been packing and cleaning for days now and we still aren’t quite done yet. We still have our bedroom to dust, mop and we have to move the extra bed out of there, too. I will post the story eventually, it just might take me awhile. It’s a long, evolved story, and you will understand that once you get a chance to read it.

Well, in case I don’t post again until I get home – Zaijin, China.

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The news that I have been holding off telling is that I am going home. I’m leaving China, and I am not coming back – at least not for a good long while. I am currently working on a post that goes into the details on why I made this choice, and I will be done with that soon. Like most of my experiences in China, the story that made me make this decision is slightly complicated, long, a bit difficult, and even at times humorous, but I’ll let you be the judge when you read it.

We will be leaving Xiamen at 7:15 AM on August 28th and flying to the city I love to loathe, Beijing, for our connector flight back to the States. My last impression of China will come in Beijing’s international airport as I wait eight and a half hours for my plane to show up and take me home. I’m still not sure how I feel about the whole thing right now. A part of me is jumping for joy that I’m going; I’ve missed home, my family and my friends. The other part of me is in a quandary. I’ve had a difficult time seeing the good for all the bad lately. Not that I haven’t enjoyed my time, I have . . . It’s too complicated to explain right now. It will take time for me to shift through my emotions and figure out how I really feel about the whole ordeal. Perhaps you will understand better than I once you have read my side of the story. I’ll finish that soon – before I leave.

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A lot of crap has been going down lately, and I haven’t really said much about it. Every time I try to compose a blog about it my thoughts get all jumbled and catch things on fire because the whole ordeal just makes me so unbelievably mad. I’ll try to explain to you the frustration that these last few weeks have mad me feel in a single sentence. I’ll go into all the gory details later – when my thoughts don’t burn through walls.

Richard, my boss, is the devil, and all of his WECL schools are little subdivisions of hell.

Ok, and now onto other things.

Today I was sitting in the office reading a recent copy of China Daily while trying to figure out what is going to happen to Phil and I in the next two weeks or so when I came across the horoscope section. Usually, I don’t read them because they are silly and absurd, but for some reason or another I found myself reading Phil’s horoscope. I had already read mine and it wasn’t the least bit interesting so I won’t bore you with what it said. Phil’s on the other hand was quite amusing, especially considering our present circumstances. I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. It was as though someone had written it specifically for Phil.

Phil’s Horoscope: Libra

If you have to deal with someone who is rather unreasonable and absurd, you can defang this individual by treating him or her with the same absurdity.

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